Katie Couric

Reports of her demise were greatly exaggerated

An hour before her live newscast begins, CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric is answering my question about how she would pitch a 60 Minutes segment on her professional life during the past two years. Couric first deadpans, "It'll make you laugh, it'll make you cry," before dissolving into guffaws and shaking her head. "That is the queerest question I have ever heard," she says. Later, when I warn her that I am about to pose an even stranger one, she girds by preparing for the old Barbara Walters–Katharine Hepburn corker, "What kind of a tree are you?" It's not the question I was going to ask, but she completes her joke anyway. "A weeping willow," Couric says, drooping dramatically. "No, not anymore. I'm a strong oak."

More From ELLE

Couric, recently 52, has had experiences that would alter anyone's inner timber. While cohost of NBC's Today show for 15 years, she became the highestpaid TV journalist in history, lost her husband and the father of her two daughters to colon cancer in 1998, broadcast her own colonoscopy live, and created an uptick in cancer screenings that medical researchers have

But the past few years took her on another kind of vertiginous ride. Hired by CBS in 2006 for $15 million a year, Couric became the first woman to sit at the nightly news desk on her own. Instead of the ratings surge CBS presumed it was paying for, after a nanosecond of Couric lift, the Tiffany Network's broadcast plonked right back into its long-held third-place berth. Couric was left to tussle not simply with the vagaries of a new home and a new format, but with critics who experienced nearly orgiastic pleasure at the prospect of her professional failure. "People seem to take some sort of perverse joy in it," Couric says of the premature grave-dancing. The question of why, she says, is best left to "a national psychiatrist."

But after this election season, especially after the poll-rattling interview with Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, Couric's ratings have risen modestly, and she is receiving hosannas from those who not long ago were throwing matches on her pyre.

"I drive a minivan, so clearly I don't get my status from my car," she says. "And I try not to get my sense of self from what people say about me. I think I've evolved to that point, not just in the past two years, but through the years of being in the public eye." Of course, she does concede that "it's better to be on the upswing."

"She took ownership of her broadcast in this election year," says executive producer Rick Kaplan, who was brought aboard the flailing Evening News in 2007 to help Couric and her newscast scrape their way back to viability. "She was much more comfortable in the anchor chair; it belonged to her all of a sudden."

The other thing that belonged to Couric, at least when it came to network coverage, was the 2008 election. The Palin interview, in which the candidate got muddled about everything from which newspapers she reads to the Supreme Court cases she disagrees with, saw more airtime than It's a Wonderful Life on Christmas Eve. There were glowing notices for Couric's smart and wacky webcasts from the political conventions and debates, which she treated as journalistic buffets, chomping on Michael Dukakis, Caroline Kennedy, and Hillary Clinton for revealing interviews. There was her "Primary Questions" series, in which she presciently asked John Edwards about infidelity, plus behind-the-scenes specials about the campaigns, ahead-ofthe- curve features about the changing social values of fundamentalist Christians, and an interview with Cindy McCain in which the candidate's wife indicated that she disagreed with him on abortion.

"There was the general feeling that she just outshone everyone else," said Tom Shales, television critic for The Washington Post, who notes that when she went to CBS, "people were so overwhelmingly mean to her," but also that "it's hard to imagine anybody just walking in there and being an overnight hit. She was expected to not only bring CBS around from the bottom of the ratings pile, but to save network news."

Kaplan, naturally, concurs: "You know, everybody deserves a little shit, but she got more than her share." At times, he says, the press was so bad that "there were days when I thought, How do you just keep working?"

But work she did. Couric's successes were not side effects of some transformative tonic. Her election coverage was made of the same stuff that has fueled her career as perhaps television's best interrogator: a stealthy combination of intelligence, approachability, and keen journalistic instinct. "What she's trying to do is illuminate," Kaplan says. "She doesn't try to `get' anybody. That's not what she thinks her job is."

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Her daughter agrees. By e-mail, 17-year-old Ellie Monahan tells me that one of her mother's talents is her ability "to relate to people in a way that makes them feel like they've known her forever. Whether she's interviewing a world leader or wounded (physically or mentally) veterans from Iraq, she acts completely NORMAL around them and makes them laugh. Her ability to make some of her most serious interviews casual while still retaining the professionalism they demand confounds me."

Couric adheres to some Honest Abe (or Tracy Flick) life rules that, she admits, "sound very Girl Scout-y," and which you can practically hear her reeling off to her daughters. They include: "Hard work and perseverance—all those values you're taught as a kid. Stay focused and do the best work you can, and believe in yourself, and if there are barricades in your way, figure out a way to navigate around them. Or to jump over them. Or to kick them down." She describes herself as someone who's always "had a very strong work ethic and cared deeply about the quality of my work. I'm competitive, and I give it my all almost every day."

When we meet at CBS, Couric is fresh from anchoring the network's inauguration coverage, a marathon that included straight reporting and analysis; interviews with presidential historians, civil rights leaders, and Jon Bon Jovi; inaugural ball coverage; and a webcast. "I was on air for nine hours straight," Couric says, "and I didn't have any Depends. Big mistake. I kept my liquid intake low."

When we meet at CBS, Couric is fresh from anchoring the network's inauguration coverage, a marathon that included straight reporting and analysis; interviews with presidential historians, civil rights leaders, and Jon Bon Jovi; inaugural ball coverage; and a webcast. "I was on air for nine hours straight," Couric says, "and I didn't have any Depends. Big mistake. I kept my liquid intake low."

In the bathroom next to her office hang framed cartoons. Among them is a New Yorker drawing from 1993 that shows Winnie-the- Pooh, Piglet, and the usually morose Eeyore, who in the illustration is smiling blissfully at a television. "Katie Couric will do that to you," reads the caption. Another, hanging over the commode, shows George H. W. Bush in his pajamas, crouching in fear as a hand with a microphone emerges menacingly from under his bed. "Katie Couric!" he's screaming. It's a reference to Couric's 1992 ambush of the fortyfirst president, when she bumped into him while on a White House tour with his wife and promptly began grilling him about his knowledge of the Iran-Contra affair.

The caricatures capture what has beguiled and frustrated Couric watchers for almost two decades. She may make interview subjects quake, but to fans, she's goofy human Zoloft. The combination irks critics who are used to categorizing public figures—perhaps women especially—in more one-dimensional terms. How could someone with her brains and ambition also do fitness segments with a trainer named High Voltage? How could the nice lady on morning TV also be a multimillion-dollarearning ballbuster?

Shales, serving as a Peabody Award judge not long after the Bush interview, remembers suggesting an award for the Today cohost. "Everyone scoffed at me," he says. "I was just shouted down. People dismissed it as being an absurd idea. But I thought she was doing one hell of a job, that she's proven [to have] a tremendous amount of skill and versatility, and that she deserved commendation." (Couric won a Peabody in 2001.)

She speaks in crisp sentences, and after two days of hearing her hold forth at high speed on the topography of Afghanistan, the governor of New York, and Justin Timberlake, among other topics, if I were to draw her, there'd be steam coming out of her ears from the rapid geargrinding going on between them.

"Part of what makes her great is this insatiable appetite," says Jennifer Yuille, Couric's political producer at CBS. "She'll walk into our office and say, `So, we're going to bring the Flip camera and I want to shoot the intro and the piece is going to be four minutes, and whatever's not in the piece will go on the Web.' She wants to be involved in everything." While they were shooting a piece about Joe Biden on the campaign trail, Yuille reports that at one point Couric was operating the camera, and in the editing room, she knew exactly which sound bites she wanted to use: "There are these hidden moments that she hears. She'll notice it and go back. Everyone knows she is a great interviewer. But she is also an excellent writer and a great storyteller."

Her skillful yarn-weaving plays into the part of her personality that sometimes undermines her seriousness. Couric is very funny, also flirty, and self-deprecating. She does silly voices, including a pitch-perfect Barney the dinosaur when she imagines donning her old Macy's hat for the inauguration parade, calling the presidential pageantry "Super-dee-duper!"

When she moved to the evening news, there was much consternation: How could the perky girl get us through our crises? Would she have enough gravitas (aging-white-guy authority) to inform us? "The fact that networks seem willing to concede that the best man for the job is clearly a woman means that it just isn't the same job anymore," wrote David Carr in The New York Times, crystallizing the point that much of the anxiety surrounding Couric's ascension to the 6:30 p.m. slot was ill-disguised discomfort with powerful femininity, and how it was degrading our institutions.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

That was thrown into sharper relief by the tenor of the criticism of Couric; it was all about the shoes, the clothes, the makeup, the hair. Before she left Today, she was assailed for her "clickety" stilettos in the Times; the same paper evaluated her coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings for CBS by noting that she wore "white slacks and very little makeup to signal to viewers that she was hard at work." As recently as the inauguration, Slate's TV critic commented that Couric "brought us the political choreography of the Commander in Chief Ball from somewhere behind her eyeliner."

It is the equivalent of Hillary Clinton being jeered for her pantsuits, for the lines on her face, for her thick ankles. It's true that between hair, accessories, skirts, and slacks, female broadcasters simply sport more plumage at which to pick than their male counterparts. But such barbs are reductive, superficial, and ultimately silly.

More From ELLE

"I still think the overwhelming image of women is, `Who looks better in this dress?' " Couric says, aware that she herself cuts a nice figure in a dress. "There is a lot of confusion for everybody. Are we supposed to be fetching? Are we supposed to be smart?" Occasionally she sees some of the high-gloss, high-hemlined anchors on cable news and thinks, "God, did I encourage this? Because sometimes I'd show my legs on the Today show."

She makes no bones about her feminism, describing herself as having "come along at the back end" of the second wave, graduating from college in 1979. "But I remember thinking, I want to have a job," she says. "I was influenced by people like Mary Tyler Moore. I know it sounds crazy, but I saw this woman out on her own, making a life for herself, and I always thought, I want into that."

She began as a desk assistant at ABC News, moving, as an assignment editor, to CNN in Atlanta, where after one quaking on-camera venture, network cofounder Reese Schonfeld famously ordered that she never appear on air again. By 1989, however, Couric was NBC's deputy Pentagon correspondent, and in 1991 began filling in on the Today show, becoming coanchor later that year. So Couric got to be Mary Tyler Moore—times 1,000.

After she made comments last summer about the gender bias slopped at Clinton by the media, a fulminating Keith Olbermann named Couric his "Worst Person in the World." Asked how she felt about this distinction, she says she didn't watch the segment. "I just heard about it," she says. "He also said after my first newscast that it looked like I had a lot of Botox or something, so I can't really take some of those things very seriously."

Discussing how people demanded, "Who does she think she is?" when she took the CBS job, Couric admits, "At times it made me wonder, Well, who do I think I am? Maybe I'm not good enough for this job." She didn't rationally doubt her own chops, she says. But "if people attack you, after a while you think, Maybe I aim too high. When you're a woman it's easy to [get sucked into that]. Why didn't they ask if Charlie Gibson aimed too high, or Brian Williams? I think it's easy to sometimes resent women who really strive to achieve."

Couric is ice-pick sharp in her point that to talk about sexism is not to blame every misfortune or ratings dip on gender. "I'm not one of those people who says it's all sexism," she says. "I think there's a whole confluence of reasons this transition was hard for me."

But still, she expresses concern about this next generation of Mary Richardses, asking, "How do we make it less challenging for my daughters, or young women coming up, to find their place in the world and be respected for who they are?"

When I ask 32-year-old producer Yuille how Couric is with other women in the office, the words aren't even out of my mouth before she replies, "She's great. She's great." Yuille says that she considers Couric not only her boss and anchor and managing editor, but also her "collaborator and friend, and she's very good at pushing you [and saying,] `Why don't you do this?' I have learned so much from her in the past year." Moreover, Yuille says, "I'm not just saying this, but sometimes I get overwhelmed and then I look at her, and she works really hard and she's a single mother who's incredibly supportive and makes her daughters a real priority."

On the night I visit the CBS studio, Ellie Monahan has stopped by, fresh from a college interview in the neighborhood. Friendly and intelligent, she later e-mails me that while her mom is "an incredibly assiduous and diligent journalist...she still finds time to spend with me and my sister, Carrie." Monahan says that Couric has "always emphasized the importance of school comes first, and ever since I was five, has told me that when it comes to boys my priorities should go as follows: kindness, brains, then looks. She wants us to have a good sense of character, be sensitive to the needs of others, and take an active interest in the world around us."

Monahan says that the family plays "Word of the Night," in which everyone has to come to the table with a new word. She also reports that her mother "doesn't stop working on something until she's done as much research as possible and she has it down pat! I'll never forget the days spent studying side by side in her office...her for Election Night and me for my calculus test!" She does voice one complaint about her mother's evening gig: "I get hungry around 6 or so...so the shift to an eight o'clock dinner was tough," she writes. "Mom says it's very `euro' though :)"

Couric's work-life high-wire act—some version of which is experienced by millions of women (and some men) all over the country— is a part of what makes her so relatable to so many people. It's fundamental to her success and complicates the question of what role her gender has played in her ups and downs. Because while some of her struggles have been the product of chronic sexism, in a year in which two women strode across a presidential, and vice-presidential, stage, Couric's gender may have been a real boon.

More From ELLE

"You want African-Americans around to talk about Barack Obama, right?" Couric says. "You want women around to reflect their experiences and see a female candidate through their particular prism. It's refreshing to not just have one particular white-male viewpoint." As for whether her coverage, and specifically her Palin interview, was goosed by common chromosomes, she says only, "People put their own stuff into whatever situation they're looking at. Perhaps the fact that I was female made people feel that it was less threatening. I don't know, really."

The strategy was not to make it about Couric's knowledge, but about Palin's. Perhaps the best advice the anchorwoman got was from a nuclear proliferation expert, who told her "not to fuss with" Palin too much. She took it to mean that if Palin said that the Pakistani government was in no way aiding and abetting terrorists along the border, it was not incumbent on Couric to point to National Intelligence Estimates. "I didn't really fuss with her about that," she says. "I just let her speak. I didn't want to get into a pissing match. I wanted her to express how she saw the world. It wasn't about showing what I knew. That doesn't even matter, except for my own ego. It was about showing America what she knew, without it being a quiz."

Couric succeeded where no one else did in showing America what Palin did, and didn't, know. Ironically, the homey familiarity (born of all those mornings in our living rooms) that hobbled Couric's transition to the evening spot worked to bolster her trustworthiness here. This was not some "gotcha" elitist journalist; this was Katie Couric. It was a tough interview but not an unkind one. She was polite but firm, pushing Palin to answer questions without once cocking her head in disbelief—as many at home were doing.

It is an interview that will be cited for generations, that will likely lead Couric's obituary. But is it maddening to have 30 years of work boiled down to one candidate who by some stroke of luck, nervousness, or ineptitude refused to name the papers she read?

"The truth of the matter," Couric says, "is that...an interview like that doesn't come around that often." It was, she says, "one of the most important interviews I've ever done." Yes, she continues, "I've done what I consider really good interviews with people like David Duke that I thought were ballsy and important, but [the Palin conversation] really did have an impact." And, she says, with the equanimity of someone who has been to the ninth circle of media hell...and hung out there for a couple of years, "I'm also appreciative that people at that moment in time respected my work."

Despite reputable reports in the spring of 2008 that Couric might be out of her anchor chair come January 2009, she says she has no immediate plans to vacate it. "As far as I know," she replies when asked if she plans to stay on. "I think it's hit its stride, as long as I continue to have flexibility and do some of the things I like doing, i.e., interviews and going out and reporting."

That flexibility was important, "once I realized that they really didn't want to alter the format of the evening news," Couric explains. "I realized that just reading lead-ins and coming up with story ideas would not necessarily be my thing." The exciting events, like election nights and inaugurations, are rare.

So Couric has had to jazz things up for herself. She created her own YouTube channel, and her webcasts have become some of the most watchable news content from CBS. She also contributes pieces to 60 Minutes and does primetime news hours. She interviewed Lil Wayne for a Grammy special. "Can you imagine a stranger duo than me and Lil Wayne, who's singing a song about girls who like to lick his lollipop?" she asks. "Ruh-roh!"

("Justin Timberlake did say to me, `I'm so glad you interviewed Lil Wayne because I wanted to see Lil Wayne and Katie in the same frame.' And I said, `What, you don't think we would hang?' And he goes, `I don't think you two would be going to high tea together.' ")

Couric secured the first sit-down TV interview with the pilot and crew of the U.S. Airways flight that ditched in the Hudson River. "To be utilized in a lot of these different venues is more fulfilling for me," she says. "I'm a lot happier."

"She seems to be more active as an anchor than the two middle-aged white men on the other networks," Shales says. "She's really in there hustling, and she deserves a lot of credit for that."

In some respects, it may not matter whether Couric breathes life into the deadly dull eveningnews format. Like Hillary Clinton, another glass-ceiling bonker, she has already won a war, not by transforming herself into some kind of avuncular news-dude, but by bringing herself— a fast-talking, driven, hard-hitting journalist who also happens to be affable and effervescent and perpetually cheerful—to the anchor's chair. She is an embodiment of a very modern lesson: that smart can be fun, that fun can have gravitas, and that gravitas can be feminine.

At the end of the broadcast, Couric sweeps upstairs, collecting daughter, colleagues, assistant, friends, me, and several hovering publicists— calling down the hall to make sure she hasn't lost any of the brood. On the way out into the cold Manhattan night, one of her compatriots points to a poster of her in the hallway, an image that features the pixie haircut she got in December and what might be called a shit-eating grin. "Yeah," Couric says drily, not letting a moment of self-satisfaction get in the way of a moment of self-deprecation. "Gums 'R Us."